WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is moving toward the end of its nine-month term with some of its biggest cases still to be decided, led by the fight over President Donald Trump’s travel ban. The justices also will rule on gerrymandering, union fees, internet sales taxes, credit card fees and cellphone privacy.

The term could end with even bigger news if a justice announces retirement plans.

The justices began this month with a narrow ruling favoring a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. With 25 cases awaiting decisions, the court is on pace to issue 48 percent of its opinions in June, the highest percentage in history, according to Adam Feldman, a scholar who runs the empiricalscotus.com website.

The court will issue its next opinions Monday. Here’s a look at what it’s scheduled to decide by the end of the month:

–– Trump travel ban: The last argument of the term will produce the most anticipated ruling. Hawaii is leading an effort to overturn Trump’s travel ban, which indefinitely bars more than 150 million people from entering the country. The latest version affects seven countries, five of them predominantly Muslim.

Opponents say the president overstepped his authority and was unconstitutionally motivated by anti-Muslim bias. Trump argues that the policy is needed to prevent terrorists from entering the country.

Arguments in April suggested the court was ready to uphold the policy. Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy indicated he was reluctant for the court to second-guess the president on a national security question.

That would be a major victory for Trump, upholding a policy that set an assertive tone for his presidency when he announced the first version of the ban a week after taking office.

–– Gerrymandering: The Supreme Court has never struck down a voting map as being so partisan it violates the Constitution. Critics of gerrymandering hope the court is ready to take that step in a fight over a Republican-drawn state legislative map in Wisconsin.

But the Oct. 2 argument, the first of the term, suggested that swing vote Kennedy and his colleagues hadn’t yet found a manageable standard to separate unconstitutional gerrymanders from legitimate political considerations.

The court then complicated matters by accepting a second case, a challenge to a single, Democratic-drawn congressional district in Maryland. That case opened the possibility of a limited decision that would allow challenges only district by district. Both cases also could get sidetracked by procedural issues.

A broad ruling against gerrymandering could bolster Democrats, letting them attack Republican-drawn maps around the country, but probably wouldn’t affect the November midterm elections.

–– Internet sales taxes: Traditional retailers and cash-strapped states are eager to overturn a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that lets many internet retailers avoid collecting sales taxes from their customers. That ruling, Quill v. North Dakota, says merchants don’t have to collect taxes unless they have a physical presence in the state.

The court accepted a South Dakota appeal that takes direct aim at that ruling. But arguments in April were inconclusive, with some justices indicating that they would prefer to leave the issue to Congress.

Such a ruling would be a victory for internet retailers that don’t always collect taxes. Those include the three companies fighting South Dakota: Wayfair, Overstock.com and Newegg. Amazon.com, the biggest online retailer, isn’t directly involved.

–– Union fees: The court’s conservative majority appears ready to allow public-sector workers to refuse to pay their share of the cost of union representation. Opponents of those so-called agency fees say workers have a free speech right not to contribute to a union that doesn’t represent their views on important public policy issues.

A 1977 Supreme Court ruling says workers can be required to pay for the cost of collective bargaining as long as they don’t have to fund ideological or political activities. Right-to-work advocates are seeking to overturn that ruling.

The issue divided a shorthanded court 4-4 two years ago. The newest justice, Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, is positioned to break the tie.

The case could affect 5 million workers in about two dozen states.

–– Mobile phone privacy: The justices are considering requiring prosecutors to get warrants before obtaining mobile-phone records that show a person’s location over the course of weeks or months.

The case involves a man convicted of taking part in a string of armed robberies near Detroit. At trial, prosecutors used months of data acquired from the man’s wireless carriers to show he was near the locations of four of the robberies when they occurred.

Prosecutors seek location information from telephone companies in tens of thousands of cases a year. The case also has implications for the growing number of personal and household devices that connect to the cloud, including virtual assistants, smart thermostats and fitness trackers.

–– Credit card fees: The court is considering reviving government allegations that American Express thwarts competition by prohibiting merchants from steering customers to cards with lower fees.

At issue is whether the U.S. government and 11 states must show that the American Express rules hurt cardholders, not just merchants.

Retailers are looking to reduce the $50 billion in fees they pay to credit card companies each year. The case is also being closely watched in Silicon Valley because of the prospect that the court’s reasoning could insulate tech giants like Facebook and Amazon.com from some antitrust suits.

–– Voter purges: The court is using an Ohio case to decide how far states can go in purging their election databases of people who might have moved away. Critics say Ohio is violating a federal law that bars people from being removed from the rolls because they didn’t vote.

Ohio mails notices to people who haven’t voted in two years, asking them to confirm their addresses. If someone doesn’t respond and then doesn’t vote during the next four years, the state removes that person.

The case has become a proxy for the highly partisan fight over election rules. Republicans are calling for stepped-up efforts to prevent voter fraud, while Democrats say those moves are a thinly veiled campaign to stop liberals and minorities from voting.

Nineteen states use voter inactivity in the process of purging their databases, though only a few make nonvoting as central as Ohio does.

–– Other cases: A few of lower-profile cases could also produce important rulings. The court is considering the fate of a California law that requires pregnancy-counseling clinics that oppose abortion to tell patients they might be eligible to get the procedure free or at a discount.

The justices are also set to decide whether people have a constitutional right to wear political apparel — including “Make America Great Again” hats and MeToo buttons — when they vote.

And the court is considering whether the judges who handle cases at the Securities and Exchange Commission were appointed in accordance with the Constitution. That case could upend administrative hearing systems across the federal government.

–– Retirement Watch: Three of the past seven justices to retire have done so shortly after the court issued its final opinions of a term. Departure speculation this year is focused on Kennedy, 81, and Justice Clarence Thomas, 69.

Neither man has given any public indication of plans to step down. But either could see 2018 as the last clear chance to have Trump nominate a successor while Republicans control the Senate.

A Kennedy retirement could herald a seismic shift given his pivotal role. A Trump-appointed successor could create a far more conservative court, one that might even overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion-rights ruling.

_________________The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.- misattributed to Alexis De Tocqueville

No representations made as to the accuracy of info in posted news articles or links

WASHINGTON -- Failing to vote can lead to getting knocked off voter registration rolls, a divided Supreme Court ruled Monday in a decision that likely will help Republicans and harm Democrats.

The court's conservative majority ruled 5-4 that Ohio did not violate federal laws by purging voters who don't vote and fail to return notices confirming their residency. Civil rights groups had challenged the state for having the strictest method of purging voters in the nation.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, noting right off the bat that an estimated one in eight voter registrations in the United States are invalid or inaccurate. He said failing to vote cannot be the sole reason for purging voters but noted that Ohio "removes registrants only if they have failed to vote and have failed to respond to a notice."

"A state violates the failure-to-vote clause only if it removes registrants for no reason other than their failure to vote," Alito said. By contrast, he said, Ohio waits six years before removal, following federal law "to the letter."

Justice Stephen Breyer penned an 18-page dissent for the liberal wing of the court, marking the sixth time this term they have dissented as a bloc. He noted that most voters simply ignore the warning notices, leaving their failure to vote as the principal cause for being purged from the rolls.

"More often than not, the state fails to receive anything back from the registrant, and the fact that the state hears nothing from the registrant essentially proves nothing at all," Breyer said.

The ruling could be a major victory for Republicans, who tend to benefit from lower voter turnout, and a stinging loss for Democrats, who do best in high-turnout elections. That's because minorities, young people and those with lower incomes are more likely to be disenfranchised by the state's policy.

Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at Demos, which sued Ohio over the voter purge, said the ruling "threatens the ability of voters to have their voices heard in our elections."

"The fight does not stop here," Naifeh said. "If states take today’s decision as a sign that they can be even more reckless and kick eligible voters off the rolls, we will fight back in the courts, the legislatures, and with our community partners across the country.”

Ohio, often a bellwether in national elections, has removed thousands of people who don't vote for two years, don't return warning notices, and then don't vote for another four years. The state was sued after the 2015 election, when those who had not voted since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 discovered they no longer were registered.

Under federal laws enacted in 1993 and 2002, states cannot remove voters from registration lists because of their failure to vote. But they can do so if voters don't respond to confirmation notices.

The question for the court was whether failing to vote could be the initial trigger leading to removal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in 2016 said no, which restored the votes of 7,515 Ohioans.

The case was the latest in a series of battles against attempts by some states to restrict voting rights and combat alleged voter fraud. Most of the states that backed Ohio have Republican governors or legislatures; most of those opposed are governed by Democrats.

The Supreme Court has heard a bevy of voting rights cases since its controversial 2013 decision striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, which had forced mostly Southern states to clear changes in election laws with federal officials.

Last term, the justices nixed the excessive use of race in redistricting by legislatures in North Carolina and Virginia; a similar case from Texas is pending. This term, it faces cases from Wisconsin and Maryland challenging what opponents claim were election maps drawn by state legislators for purely partisan gain.

Several other states that use the failure to vote as a trigger in efforts to cleanse their registration rolls could be affected by the high court's decision in the Ohio case, including Georgia, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and West Virginia.

But Ohio's law was considered the harshest in the nation because it kick-started the purging process after only two years. During oral argument in January, Paul Smith, the lawyer for those challenging the law, said "most of the people who are purged have not moved."

But U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco — whose office changed sides in the case after Trump replaced President Barack Obama — said Ohio had the right to streamline "over-inflated" and "bloated" voter registration rolls.

_________________The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.- misattributed to Alexis De Tocqueville

No representations made as to the accuracy of info in posted news articles or links

WASHINGTON (AP) — A sharply divided Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several mostly Muslim countries, rejecting a challenge that it discriminated against Muslims or exceeded his authority. A dissenting justice said the outcome was a historic mistake.

The 5-4 decision Tuesday is a big victory for Trump on an issue that is central to his presidency, and the court’s first substantive ruling on a Trump administration policy. The president quickly tweeted his reaction: “Wow!”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the five conservative justices, including Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch.

Roberts wrote that presidents have substantial power to regulate immigration. He also rejected the challengers’ claim of anti-Muslim bias.

But he was careful not to endorse either Trump’s provocative statements about immigration in general or Muslims in particular, including Trump’s campaign pledge to keep Muslims from entering the country.

“We express no view on the soundness of the policy,” Roberts wrote.

The travel ban has been fully in place since December, when the justices put the brakes on lower court rulings that had ruled the policy out of bounds and blocked part of it from being enforced.

In a dissent she summarized in court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “History will not look kindly on the court’s misguided decision today, nor should it.” Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan also dissented.

Sotomayor wrote that based on the evidence in the case “a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.” She said her colleagues in the majority arrived at the opposite result by “ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”

She likened the case to the discredited Korematsu V. U.S. decision that upheld the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Roberts responded in his opinion that “Korematsu has nothing to do with this case” and “was gravely wrong the day it was decided.”

The travel ban was among the court’s biggest cases this term and the latest in a string of 5-4 decisions in which the conservative side of the court, bolstered by the addition of Gorsuch last year, prevailed. Gorsuch was nominated by Trump after Republicans in the Senate refused to grant a hearing to federal appeals Judge Merrick Garland, who was appointed by Barack Obama with more than 10 months remaining in Obama’s term.

The Trump policy applies to travelers from five countries with overwhelmingly Muslim populations — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It also affects two non-Muslim countries, blocking travelers from North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials and their families. A sixth majority Muslim country, Chad, was removed from the list in April after improving “its identity-management and information sharing practices,” Trump said in a proclamation.

The administration had pointed to the Chad decision to show that the restrictions are premised only on national security concerns.

The challengers, though, argued that the court could not just ignore all that has happened, beginning with Trump’s campaign tweets to prevent the entry of Muslims into the United States.

The travel ban has long been central to Trump’s presidency.

He proposed a broad, all-encompassing Muslim ban during the presidential campaign in 2015, drawing swift rebukes from Republicans as well as Democrats. And within a week of taking office, the first travel ban was announced with little notice, sparking chaos at airports and protests across the nation.

While the ban has changed shape since then, it has remained a key part of Trump’s “America First” vision, with the president believing that the restriction, taken in tandem with his promised wall at the southern border, would make the Unites States safer from potentially hostile foreigners.

In a statement he released Tuesday morning, Trump hailed the decision as “a moment of profound vindication” following “months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country.”

Strongly disagreeing, Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota said, “This decision will someday serve as a marker of shame.” Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, and Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who was born in Japan, both compared the ban and the ruling to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Critics of Trump’s ban had urged the justices to affirm the decisions in lower courts that generally concluded that the changes made to the travel policy did not erase the ban’s legal problems.

The current version dates from last September and it followed what the administration has called a thorough review by several federal agencies, although no such review has been shared with courts or the public.

Federal trial judges in Hawaii and Maryland had blocked the travel ban from taking effect, finding that the new version looked too much like its predecessors. Those rulings that were largely upheld by federal appeals courts in Richmond, Virginia, and San Francisco.

But the Supreme Court came to a different conclusion Tuesday. The policy has “a legitimate grounding in national security concerns,” and it has several moderating features, including a waiver program that would allow some people from the affected countries to enter the U.S., Roberts said. The administration has said that 809 people have received waivers since the ban took full effect in December.

Roberts wrote that presidents have frequently used their power to talk to the nation “to espouse the principles of religious freedom and tolerance on which this Nation was founded.” But he added that presidents and the country have not always lived up “to those inspiring words.”

The challengers to the ban asserted that Trump’s statements crossed a constitutional line, Roberts said.

“But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements. It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility,” he said

If the initial Supreme Court decision in Gill v Whitford didn’t signal a distaste for activism on gerrymandering issues, two actions by the high court today made it crystal clear. The more emphatic of these came in today’s orders rather than in an opinion, although the court did settle a gerrymandering case today, too. The court overturned an appellate court ruling in a North Carolina complaint of partisan gerrymandering, restoring the Republican-friendly outcome of the status quo ante:

Dealing a setback to Democrats on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a lower court’s ruling that Republicans lawmakers in North Carolina drew congressional district boundaries to ensure lopsided victories for their own party, violating Democratic voters’ constitutional rights.

The justices sent the case back to a federal three-judge panel to reconsider whether the plaintiffs, including a group of Democratic voters, have the necessary legal standing to sue in the case involving a contentious practice called partisan gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court put on hold the lower court’s order that a new map be drawn, leaving the Republican-drawn districts in place for congressional elections in November, giving a boost to Republicans in their bid to maintain control of the House.

The fact that this order was not outcome-neutral offers some insight into the court’s overall willingness to accept that these cases are even appropriate for judicial review. The order today instructs the lower court to consider standing in the light of Gill, which the court remanded to give the plaintiffs an opportunity to make a better case for standing as well. The ruling, however, makes it very difficult to establish the kind of “concrete and particularized injury” required for standing when the cases are all about party performance:

Four of the plaintiffs in this case pleaded such a particularized burden. But as their case progressed to trial, they failed to pursue their allegations of individual harm. They instead rested their case on their theory of statewide injury to Wisconsin Democrats, in support of which they offered three kinds of evidence. First, they presented testimony pointing to the lead plaintiff’s hope of achieving a Democratic majority in the legislature. Under the Court’s cases to date, that is a collective political interest, not an individual legal interest. Second, they produced evidence regarding the mapmakers’ deliberations as they drew district lines. The District Court relied on this evidence in concluding that those mapmakers sought to understand the partisan effect of the maps they were drawing. But the plaintiffs’ establishment of injury in fact turns on effect, not intent, and requires a showing of a burden on the plaintiffs’ votes that is “actual or imminent, not ‘conjectural’ or ‘hypothetical.’ ” Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S., at 560. Third, the plaintiffs presented partisan asymmetry studies showing that Act 43 had skewed Wisconsin’s statewide map in favor of Republicans. Those studies do not address the effect that a gerrymander has on the votes of particular citizens. They measure instead the effect that a gerrymander has on the fortunes of political parties. That shortcoming confirms the fundamental problem with the plaintiffs’ case as presented on this record. It is a case about group political interests, not individual legal rights.

The issue of partisan gerrymandering doesn’t implicate individual voting capabilities at all. It suffers from attempting to graft the solutions for redistricting issues involving immutable characteristics (ethnicity and race) on mutable characteristics (party affiliation). The former can’t be changed and the Constitution speaks to voting and citizenship rights in that regard, especially the 14th and 15th Amendments, whereas there is no protected status for party affiliation in the Constitution.

The court also signaled a limit of its patience on the former today. In a ruling on Abbott v Perez, the court upheld most of a new redistricting map in Texas that was required after a previous one was found to be discriminatory on immutable characteristics. The legislature approved the latter plan after its creation by a court, but activists challenged it anyway:

After the 2010 census, Texas was awarded four new congressional districts because of the state’s population growth. Almost all of the growth came from an increase in black and Hispanic residents, but the new maps produced by the legislature fulfilled its goal of protecting Anglo Republicans, the challengers charged.

The maps were found by the district court to probably be unconstitutional, and the judges drew interim maps to be used in the 2012 elections.

The outcomes, though, were much the same. In 2013, the Republican legislature voted to permanently adopt those judicially drawn maps.

Texas argued it could not be a racial gerrymander when using the lines drawn by the neutral judges.

The 5-4 majority ruled that the legislature’s good faith in adopting the judiciary-drawn maps should have been assumed, and that the burden of proving otherwise should have been on the plaintiffs:

Whenever a challenger claims that a state law was enacted with discriminatory intent, the burden of proof lies with the challenger, not the State. Reno v. Bossier Parish School Bd., 520 U. S. 471, 481. In redistricting cases, the “good faith of [the] state legislature must be presumed.” Miller v. Johnson, 515 U. S. 900, 915. The allocation of the burden of proof and the presumption of legislative good faith are not changed by a finding of past discrimination, which is but “one evidentiary source” relevant to the question of intent. Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U. S. 252, 267. Here, the 2011 plans were repealed, and not reenacted, by the 2013 Legislature. Nor did it use criteria that arguably carried forward the effects of the 2011 Legislature’s discriminatory intent. Instead, it enacted, with only small changes, the Texas court plans developed pursuant to this Court’s instructions. The Texas court contravened these basic burden of proof principles, referring, e.g., to the need to “cure” the earlier Legislature’s “taint” and concluding that the Legislature had engaged in no deliberative process to do so. This fundamentally flawed approach must be reversed.

The only exception to this ruling was one state house district, which was created outside of the judiciary-authored redistricting. And then re-created, and modified again after that, thanks to an argument as to which minority community should benefit most:

HD90 is an impermissible racial gerrymander. HD90 was not copied from the Texas court’s interim plans. Instead, the 2013 legislature substantially modified that district. In 2011, the Legislature, responding to pressure from counsel to one of the plaintiff groups, increased the district’s Latino population in an effort to make it a Latino opportunity district. It also moved the city of Como, which is predominantly African-American, out of the district. When Como residents and their Texas House representative objected, the Legislature moved Como back. But that decreased the Latino population, so the Legislature moved more Latinos into the district. Texas argues that its use of race as the predominant factor in HD90’s design was permissible because it had “good reasons to believe” that this was necessary to satisfy §2, Bethune-Hill, 580 U. S., at ___. But it is the State’s burden to prove narrow tailoring, and Texas did not do so on the record here.

Justices Thomas and Gorsuch questioned whether the Voting Rights Act applies to redistricting at all as part of their concurrence in this opinion. While their views do not necessarily act as a precedent on later cases, it’s a warning shot that the Supreme Court views the judiciary’s role in outcome-based redistricting challenges as becoming more limited in the future. With that in mind, don’t expect much support in the courts for future gerrymandering challenges on the basis of underperformance of political parties.

_________________The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.- misattributed to Alexis De Tocqueville

No representations made as to the accuracy of info in posted news articles or links

Dayam! The Left counts on Justice Kennedy to be their swing vote and he just tears them a new one, turning the Calif. Legislature's own language back on them.

Quote:

It does appear that viewpoint discrimination is inherent in the design and structure of this Act. This law is a paradigmatic example of the serious threat presented when government seeks to impose its own message in the place of individual speech, thought, and expression. For here the State requires primarily pro-life pregnancy centers to promote the State’s own preferred message advertising abortions. This compels individuals to contradict their most deeply held beliefs, beliefs grounded in basic philosophical, ethical, or religious precepts, or all of these. And the history of the Act’s passage and its underinclusive application suggest a real possibility that these individuals were targeted because of their beliefs.

The California Legislature included in its official history the congratulatory statement that the Act was part of California’s legacy of “forward thinking.” App. 38–39. But it is not forward thinking to force individuals to “be an instrument for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view [they] fin[d] unacceptable.” Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U. S. 705, 715 (1977). It is forward thinking to begin by reading the First Amendment as ratified in 1791; to understand the history of authoritarian government as the Founders then knew it; to confirm that history since then shows how relentless authoritarian regimes are in their attempts to stifle free speech; and to carry those lessons onward as we seek to preserve and teach the necessity of freedom of speech for the generations to come. Governments must not be allowed to force persons to express a message contrary to their deepest convictions. Freedom of speech secures freedom of thought and belief. This law imperils those liberties.

_________________I haven't figured out how to the block thingy works but if anyone alters my posts I will become really, really angry and throw monkey poop out of my cage.

Dayam! The Left counts on Justice Kennedy to be their swing vote and he just tears them a new one, turning the Calif. Legislature's own language back on them.

Quote:

It does appear that viewpoint discrimination is inherent in the design and structure of this Act. This law is a paradigmatic example of the serious threat presented when government seeks to impose its own message in the place of individual speech, thought, and expression. For here the State requires primarily pro-life pregnancy centers to promote the State’s own preferred message advertising abortions. This compels individuals to contradict their most deeply held beliefs, beliefs grounded in basic philosophical, ethical, or religious precepts, or all of these. And the history of the Act’s passage and its underinclusive application suggest a real possibility that these individuals were targeted because of their beliefs.

The California Legislature included in its official history the congratulatory statement that the Act was part of California’s legacy of “forward thinking.” App. 38–39. But it is not forward thinking to force individuals to “be an instrument for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view [they] fin[d] unacceptable.” Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U. S. 705, 715 (1977). It is forward thinking to begin by reading the First Amendment as ratified in 1791; to understand the history of authoritarian government as the Founders then knew it; to confirm that history since then shows how relentless authoritarian regimes are in their attempts to stifle free speech; and to carry those lessons onward as we seek to preserve and teach the necessity of freedom of speech for the generations to come. Governments must not be allowed to force persons to express a message contrary to their deepest convictions. Freedom of speech secures freedom of thought and belief. This law imperils those liberties.

Quote:

Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U. S. 705, 715 (1977)

Yeah but the activists will blame Trump for that.

_________________The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.- misattributed to Alexis De Tocqueville

No representations made as to the accuracy of info in posted news articles or links

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